The Cost of Everything and the Value of Nothing!

I wonder what Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran Pastor and theologian, would make of today's obsession with personal value. It is interesting to note the current silence in staffroom and works cafeteria regarding the value of property.

Bonhoeffer, in his book, the Cost of Discipleship, writes of Cheap and Costly Grace. One has to question whether there is anything but Costly Grace with its uneasy bedfellow, nothing but a counterfeit, a fraud, a sham.

He wrote. "Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ."

With more loss than profit in the news perhaps we need to answer the leading question Jesus posed when he asked. "What good would it do to get everything you want and lose you, the real you? What could you ever trade your soul for?" Mark 8:36